The news has been keeping a weather eye on the latest James Bond film (currently only known as Bond 25), leading to a sizable leak and subsequent announcement over the weekend that could shake the series all the way to its foundations—and I’m not talking about the obliteration of Bond’s ancestral home, Skyfall.
I’m talking about the new 007.
[Speculation around Bond25 movie rumors below.]
It was already known that James Bond’s retirement at the end of Spectre stuck for this new film; the basic synopsis for Bond25 involves Bond living in Jamaica and deciding to come out of retirement when his buddy Felix Leiter asks for his help—while his old spy crew will undoubtedly end up lending him support in some capacity, that doesn’t mean that Bond is back in action via any official channels. More importantly, if he did formally retire prior to the film, that’s a vacant double-oh slot that MI6 would need to fill.
And it turns out that they filled it with the incomparable Lashana Lynch.
There will be a new 007 when Bond gets back into the fray, and Lynch (of Captain Marvel fame) will be the one answering to Q’s beleaguered call of “Now, pay attention, 007″ from now on. This makes Lynch the very first female and very first black person to occupy the title of 007. But the fact is, we have no idea what that means for the series going forward. Here are just a few questions that arise from her casting:
Is James Bond Going to Retire For Good (or Die)?
Granted “for good” is already hazy assertion given the state of franchise media today. Bond could certainly retire for now and then crop back up as the central character the next time the franchise wants to completely reboot itself. But the character’s future has never been more up in the air as a result of the unique way that Daniel Craig’s iteration was positioned. While his introduction was, in fact, a soft reboot of the Bond canon, the films hinted that Craig’s Bond has ostensibly been through all/most of the classic Bond stories during the period between Quantum of Solace and Skyfall. Spectre then capped off Bond’s character arc, essentially redoing the Vesper Lynd storyline with Madeleine Swann and having him walk away from the spy world. Even if he decides to help out his buddy Felix when asked, Bond’s story is effectively complete.
And if Bond makes it through Bond25 alive (because character death is certainly a possibility here), then he could just crop up in later installments as a grizzled, grumpy retiree who is tired of people continually bugging him for spy advice when all he wants is to sip daiquiris on his boat with a gorgeous person nearby for company. It seems like exactly the sort of cameos that Daniel Craig would be into at some point in the future.
Is The Bond Franchise Going to Become the 007 Series?
The Bond film franchise has had over half a century to sell their particular brand of masculinity—a brand that Daniel Craig himself has been pointedly inching away from with each film. There is a lot of talk on whether or not the character can, or even should, survive in a post #MeToo era… but that doesn’t mean that 007 has to vanish from the face of the Earth. (And given that the franchise is a license to print money, there’s no way it’s being shelved.) Now that we have a brand new character taking up the mantle, is this going to be the new modus operandi?
More to the point, will Lynch get to star in her own 007 film after this? Because if the character is introduced here only to be supplanted, that would read as an awful publicity stunt with no substance behind it whatsoever. But if Lynch becomes the very first new 007, who paves the way for others to take up the role in coming years, that would be a spectacular way of moving forward with a brand new outlook for a new era.
Are Bond and the New 007 Going to Flirt and/or Get Cozy? Is That Actually a Good Idea?
It’s possible that Bond and the new 007—whose name is Nomi, though we don’t have her last name yet—might share more than a license to kill. According to an insider leak reported on by the Daily Mail, “Bond, of course, is sexually attracted to the new female 007 and tries his usual seduction tricks, but is baffled when they don’t work on a brilliant, young black woman who basically rolls her eyes at him and has no interest in jumping into his bed. Well, certainly not at the beginning.”
Suddenly, Craig’s insistence on having Phoebe Waller-Bridge doctor the script makes a lot more sense here. If Nomi does eventually decide to have a fling with Bond, that could come off terribly if the film treats her more as a love interest than a new central character. Hopefully, the movie walks that line in a more entertaining fashion because come on, is there anything more hilariously in tune with Bond’s narcissism than a desire for 007 to sleep with 007? If they’re both equally cavalier about it, that could be one of the funniest things the franchise ever pulls off.
“Bond Women” Instead of “Bond Girls”, Huh?
Esquire reported that the new edict of the franchise states “We were all told that from now on [Bond girls] are to be addressed as ‘Bond women’.” This is the kind of detail that could bode ill rather than good. If the point is that we are retroactively referring to all female characters in Bond films as “Bond Women”, that’s considerably less infantalizing than the previous title, and isn’t a bad move. On the other hand, if we’re referring to the current crop of women in a potential upcoming 007 franchise as “Bond Women”, that doesn’t make a lick of sense.
If the series is trying to evolve, then the current characters in it don’t need to be defined by Bond at all. Nomi sure isn’t a “Bond Woman”, for starters. She’s 007, thanks and goodbye. Moreover, it would be wonderful to see some of the women in the franchise actually have relationships to one another. Nomi and Eve Moneypenny should be after-work drinking buddies, just to get the ball rolling.
Can the Bond Franchise Successfully Redefine Itself Outside of Its Titular Leading Man?
At the end of the day, the Bond franchise is in desperate need of a makeover if it’s to keep up with the world. Progress has been glacially slow where these films are concerned—we were given a female M nearly a quarter of a century ago, only to have her pushed aside in favor of a more traditional arrangement after Skyfall. Following that walk-back, it seems only right for the series to make a real commitment to change. People love spy movies, and the formula for Bond films doesn’t go up in flames just because the person at the center is no longer ordering questionable martinis.
While the Craig era of Bond movies made its central figure far more self-aware when it came to his treatment of others, maybe it’s time to see what the spy world looks like from a different perspective. It would be a great way to find out if there is anything interesting about the franchise that’s rooted in something other than the bodies of dead women. And it would be a prime chance for the spy film genre to get the workout it so desperately needs.
Emmet Asher-Perrin wants it known that they adore Daniel Craig as James Bond regardless, and will certainly miss him once he’s permanently retired. You can bug him on Twitter, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
I don’t mind the 007 designation falling on someone else, its an organic way to do things. And if the character is good, the we’re golden. About the franchise’s treatment of women, I like Waller-Bridge’s take on things, and I’m paraphrasing from an article I read yesterday, but she basically said that Bond himself doesn’t need to treat women better, because that’s who the character is. But the franchise/story does need to treat women better, and those 2 things aren’t the same.
This is fascinating news for sure! Not sure if the “Bond brand” can survive such a radical transformation, though. (I’m neither a fan nor a hater of the Bond franchise, so I’m just speaking in a general way here.)
I do find the whole Bond concept rather frozen in time, as “Progress has been glacially slow” intimates. But I guess it responds to a market that likes it this way. Wouldn’t it be financially safer for them to keep the 007 cash cow as is, develop an alternate female agent called 666 or whatever, and gauge the market that way?
The whole Bond Girls vs. Bond Women argument seems more than a little silly to me, though. There is nothing “infantile” about a Bond Girl –as Ursula Andress and Hale Berry aphroditeing their way out of the sea can certainly prove.
@@@@@ 1: “she basically said that Bond himself doesn’t need to treat women better, because that’s who the character is. But the franchise/story does need to treat women better, and those 2 things aren’t the same.”
That’s an interesting point.
Uh, I thought the franchise has been treating women better. Have we already forgotten Judi Dench as M, who played the role for around 20 years? How about Naomie Harris as the new Moneypenny? That’s a great opportunity for a spinoff right there.
As for Lynch as the new 007, it sounds interesting. In addition to that, one avenue that remains unexplored is the “club” of Double-O agents in the service. Just who are all those other agents? Do they ever get together on holiday?
I think it will be the end of the franchise..
It’ll be interesting to see if the franchise could survive a transition to being the “007 Series”, just like how it has survived multiple leading men as Bond. When you boil the character down, there’s not much there that carries over from movie to movie – he’s a spy, he’s a posh British guy who likes martinis, he has some cool gadgets. That’s about it.
@@@@@ 6: Heck, it survived Sean Connery’s toupee!
In theory it isn’t a bad idea but the financial failure of Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, which lost $70,000,000.00 (https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/movies/the-verdict-is-in-ghostbusters-flopped/news-story/b32b89c525233509c899886cbd19862a) does not bode well for gender-flipping a franchise.
@@@@@ 8: To be completely fair, the new Ghostbusters was not only a gender-flipping movie, but a bad, unfunny one as well.
But I agree that such a total race-gender flip in a franchise that has not changed a whole lot since the early 60s is financially unsafe, to put it mildly.
What would be interesting is if the new 007 and Moneypenny at least flirt.
Also, the “shaken, not stirred” martini has been a laugh for decades now. Bond is entitled to his preference, but “stirred, not shaken” would dilute the drink less. Maybe he likes the sharper single flavor.
Still kind of odd that this was enshrined in the lore, since, in the books, he has scotch and sodas more often.
9.
Not changed a whole lot since the early 60s? Oh, I don’t know about that. I mean, we’ve come quite some distance since the days of Connery dismissing a woman with a slap to her behind and saying “Man talk.”
The whole point and purpose of the Bond franchise is male adventure fantasy. It’s never been even slightly realistic because it was never intended to be – not the spy adventures, and not the wenching. As much as I appreciated the movement towards a psychologically real James Bond in the early revisioning movies, a very strong case can be made that the target audience for the franchise wouldn’t be interested – female-oriented romantic fantasy is very, very different than male. I suspect men will abandon a female Bond in droves, and women just won’t be interested.
“I inherited the number from the previous 007, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real 007 either. His name was Brosnan. The real 007 has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Patagonia.”
@5 If this marks the end of the franchise, maybe the franchise needs to go.
Hollywood: let’s spread diversity. Studios take all existing classic pop culture icons and swap their biology to one that has been a subject of societial vicitimization and oppression.
That’s how I see it. Diverse IPs, on the other hand, oh forget about them.
I’m all for strong women in action films. Atomic Blonde comes to mind. This however is just too contrived, and desperate. The Bond films are just not that interesting anymore, and the franchise is pretty played out. This just seems like a last ditch effort for them to remain relevant.
Well, I think it will be a serious twist. They love killing off 00 agents, so maybe she will end up dead and James is called back into action :)
Tweak it here and there, but don’t muddle with a formula. It just needs a decent script and storyline to make it work.
Presumably the character won’t be called James. Presumably they won’t want to continue the character being a problem drinker. Presumably they wan’t it to still be about MI6 and her Majesty having paid assassins.
So its basically a spinoff now. Not really Bond. Time will tell if its more Frasier or Joey.
@@@@@ 12. I’m a woman. If I went to the movies and had a choice between a Bond movie and a “chick flick,” I’d choose the Bond movie, and I’m sure I’m not the only woman who would. I don’t know that I’ve seen a Bond movie yet I didn’t enjoy, even if it wasn’t a good movie (Die Another Day comes to mind).
And I would love to see a female 007. As much as I’ve enjoyed the previous 007 movies, I also like seeing new twists on an old theme, and having a woman as 007 would certainly fit the bill.
@9 Ashgrove – I know you weren’t directing your comment to me but I thought you’ve raised an interesting debate on whether people are reacting to gender flips or just reacting to re-makes in general.
I’ll have to take your word for it that the new Ghostbusters was objectively bad. But I also suspect part of the failure of that fill was *both* reaction to its politics and re-make fatigue. There was a obviously a very vocal element who were explicit that they didn’t want to see that film because it was gender filiiped. But I suspect there was also a quieter group because they didn’t want to see a new Ghostbusters – because they don’t want Hollywood remaking a good film.
You can see the this in the backlash directed at the proposed remake of Back To The Future. There was no hint it was going to be gender-flipped but people hearing about it poured scorn on it. Becuase they don’t want to see a beloved film remade. Its unecessary, its going to suck, it can’t possibly live up to the high expectations set by the original.
So yeah, there’s politics involved. There may be a bad film being made.
But there’s something else there too…..remakes are generally a bad idea. I’d hypothesise that the likely cause of this is that remakes are inherintly uninspired – because inspiration would leave one disinterested in making a remake.
@20
It was. A comedy movie should land many jokes. This one movie didn’t. It has nothing do with the gender of the characters, but what the characters did and say. And they didn’t say much to comedic effect. We’re talking about actresses who objectively can be funny, as we seen in other movies, but in this one, they weren’t. The writing was simply not good.
Spider-man, for example, keeps getting remade or rebooted and keeps getting solid box-office and reviews from critics and general population. No, that’s not it. And remake is not a good word for it. The story is not the same. It’s a modern take on “Ghostbusters”. It’s more a reboot. It doesn’t matter how you label it, though: the movie was objectively unfunny.
I’d always thought of “James Bond” as being a codename just as much as “007”, passed down from agent to agent as they die of cirrhosis, so I’d be totally fine with Lynch’s character being called James.
The problem I have with changing everything intrinsic to the Bond franchise is the people endorsing these changes are not really fans. They essentially want to ban the character in its traditional format. No machismo. No colonial spirit. Bond is simply a target to them, something to be conquered and changed for the better.
love Bond no matter what![.](//s04.flagcounter.com/mini/Jkzv/bg_FFFFFF/txt_DEDEDE/border_FFFFFF/flags_0/" width="1"/>)
@23. jb1: Well if they kept the machismo and colonial spirit, Bond would go the way of Tarzan… a dinosaur, a relic.
You could still have a super-spy with cool gadgets and tech, who happens to love women (and I mean love, not lust after).
And his drinks would have to be updated. He gets the martini wrong anyway.
@25 Bond also has the competence porn thing going for them. There’s a certain appeal to pretty people doing highly improbable things that can be independent of gender and race.
#25
That’s a big part of Bond’s appeal though. He was a dinosaur even when the books first became popular, harkening back to a time in then recent history, pre-Suez Crisis, when the British were still a major player on the world stage. His tastes are often out-of-step, even within his own country. In the Goldfinger movie, he puts down The Beatles!
He’s an old-fashioned, magnificent bastard. So if the character, or whoever holds the 007 number, is completely in line with everyone else, then it’s just another watered down Bond clone.
And if we’re looking for specific progressive values in a government agent with a ‘license to kill,’ uh, we might want to reconsider our choice in hero. It’s just not there. Dinosaurs don’t wear capes.
I think this is all reading too much into this. We know she has replaced him as 007. This is very different than replacing him as the character of the franchise. There is absolutely no indication the latter is happening.
For better or for worse, I do not see this happening. The Bond series makes way too much money in countries that would never accept this change (I.e. India). A spin off series that is more domestic focused? Sure, maybe. But not the whole franchise.
I hate to be cynical, and I hope that I’m wrong, but I have no faith in Eon, especially after the catastrophic mess that was Spectre, and I suspect that it’s a publicity stunt rather than any change in direction. It certainly set off spasms of hysterical pearl clutching by terrified men’s rights snowflakes in several FaceBook groups that discuss espionage movies, and no publicity is bad publicity. I guess.
I’ve been a Bond fan since an elderly aunt succumbed to my nagging and took me to see Dr. No in 1963, but at this point I think the best thing the franchise can do is end. I do love Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s work, but with franchise movies the auteur is whoever owns the franchise. There is only so much anyone, even a skilled director, let alone a writer, can do in the face of that juggernaut. My hope for the property is that they team up with somebody like Netflix and do period series adaptations of the novels, one per season. Chasing blockbusters is what painted them into this corner to begin with. I wasn’t even crazy about Skyfall, especially with the unnecessary fridging of Judi Dench’s M.
Certainly the casting of Lashana Lynch is the only good news to emerge from 25, other than the involvement of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I was hoping that Craig would stick to his word and not return. He looked utterly miserable in Spectre, and I don’t blame him. For that matter, everyone looked miserable except for Ben Whishaw, ever the trouper. I’ve admired every performance that I’ve seen by Léa Seydoux, except for Spectre, where she and Craig had absolutely no chemistry. The return of Christoph Waltz is also unwelcome, not because of the actor, but because of the asinine Blofeld with daddy issues development.
There are a few (sadly, only a few) good performances by women as spies. @16 mentioned Atomic Blonde, which I thought was better than any Daniel Craig Bond after Casino Royale. What we really need is a decent, faithful Modesty Blaise adaptation. And I rarely see mentioned in these discussions Keri Russell’s astonishing performance as Elizabeth Jennings in The Americans, one of the best written and acted roles in decades, regardless of genre or gender. Ironically, given that the new nominations were just announced, I remain furious at the Emmys that Russell never won one. Nor did Matthew Rhys who deserved at least one for Philip Jennings. And Holly Taylor certainly deserved a Best Supporting for Paige, at least in seasons 4 & 6.
@19: That’s interesting, because given the choice between a “chick flick” and a Bond movie, I’d generally be more interested in giving the former a try. And I have a good ol’ Y-chromosome. Of course, there are plenty of dire films in both categories.
Unless the movie is done well, I don’t think men generally will be interested in a Bond film that ceases to be male wish fulfillment, precisely because it has been changed from the previous pattern. A film that might be perfectly acceptable as an action-filled spy flick will likely be rejected as a Bond movie. And as for women… I don’t have a strong feeling, but more than you think might reject the film for the same reason.
I’m not sure why everyone is so down on replacing Judi Dench as M. I don’t see how it can really be considered fridging, or “walking back” having a female in a position of competent authority within the films. Part of the Bond legendarium is that just like Bond, the people around him change constantly. Judi Dench put her own indelible mark on the character of M, and did it for more than two decades. I really don’t see how that’s fridging. She may have been tired of playing the character herself. I understand there are lots of fraught issues with representation in Hollywood, but this doesn’t seem like one of them. As a character she was treated with respect, and was sexualized or portrayed as incompetent or anything like that. I would think she was a perfect example of gender-neutral casting – she was competent and tough as nails and her being a woman was incidental to that. It’s not “walking back” anything that she was replaced by a man.
I think a great deal of the Judi Dench M complaints come from the absurd way in which her character was removed, and not so much the removal itself.
@@@@@ 20: I agree with everything Pedro said. There was so much talent in that movie, yet they couldn’t do much with the material they were given.
In the particular case of Ghostbusters, though, the reboot thing plus the genderflip thing may have contributed to create a perfect storm as far as the box office was concerned. I have seen much worse movies make gazillions (Adam Sandler’s abominations are a perfect example).
(Spoiler warning: Don’t read if you don’t know the real timeline of James Bond as Ian Fleming and his followers as authors meant it to be.)
I have been thinking about this “new 007” idea for a while. In my opinion, they will do it too late. The last canonical Bond-book is Raymond Benson’s Die Another Day, which was the last official mission for original James Bond. So, Bond retired at the age of 76 or 77 (please read Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice (1964) for reference).
I have seen Craig’s Bond films as a “full reboot”. Craig’s Bond can not be the original James Bond, because: 1) Casino Royale happened in 1950’s and Miles Messervy was still M in the story. 2) Bond can not be a secret agent at his 80’s and 90’s. Even theoretically it’s not possible. Even the strongest guys will become weaker when they turn 80 years old. 3) Craig’s Bond-films get many Bond-facts wrong, like the story behind Hannes Oberhauser’s death. He was killed by Dexter Smythe at his adventure in smuggling gold bars to Jamaica (please read Octopussy (1966) for reference). Of course it could be possible that Oberhauser’s son would have adopted the Blofeld’s name and became the next Blofeld, but the story should have been told differently, anyway. Original Blofeld died in Japan 1963, so the prelude from the film For Your Eyes Only (1981) can be merely considered as Bond-fiction. Diamonds Are Forever (1971) is not a canonical Bond-film at all: The story was almost completely re-invented for a screenplay.
So, the female 007 should have been introduced in 2006, and Brosnan should have played the role of the retired 007. Well, actually, I always liked Brosnan’s acting, but he was obviously too young for the role. It would have been a better idea to keep Roger Moore for the last canonical Bond-films, so the agent would have got older accurately. Brosnan looked about 50 years old in DAD, and he should have looked about 76 years old. But in the Bond-film from 2006, they could have added some make-up for him to make him look much older. Then, they could have started from Quantum of Solace and make the new canon (what Craig has done) suitable for female 007. It would have then made sense, if other James Bond facts would have kept accurate.
In side of these new female 007 -films, it could have been possible to make films around the original James Bond, too. At EON, they could have found a suitable actor: with black hair, 183 cm tall, suave-looking, and British, or British-lookalike man to play original Bond. After that they could have gone back to 1950’s and 1960’s and made a faithful adaptation of Casino Royale, followed by already badly made Live and Let Die – in between, Moonraker (which has never been filmed) – Diamonds Are Forever, and finally, The Man with the Golden Gun. After that they could have turned Kingsley Amis‘, Anthony Horowitz’s, Sebastian Faulks’, John Gardner’s and Raymond Benson’s books into films. (Jeffery Deaver’s Carte Blanche is a complete reboot, so it can be considered as Bond-fiction, too.) I believe that it would have been a great idea to release these two lines of movies one after another as “007-series” and “James Bond -series”. It could have gone this way: 007: Quantum of Solace (2006), James Bond: Casino Royale (2008), 007: Skyfall (2010), James Bond: Live and Let Die (2012), 007: SPECTRE (2014), James Bond: Moonraker (2016), and so on. Then we would have seen continuity from James Bond’s character to new 007, and supplemental films to the original canon every second year. That would have allowed EON to work with a new story for a period of three years and use old Bond stories as bases for screenplays for every second film. A problem would have been solved: No need to make complete reboots, unless they’d run out of original canonical books, and would need to turn Carte Blanche as the next film.
The 007 Mi6 number should have been retired with Mr. Bond’s retirement or death. He was apparently M16’s number one agent. It would have been fitting for him to return snd have the 007 number re-activated when he came out of retirement. The actress playing 007 should have been given a different “Double O” number. Which, in my opinion would have open the door for her to start her own movie franchise under a new Double-O number! That would have been really cool! With that said I personally will not be attending Mr. Craig’s final movie. He should’ve been re-activated as 007. Nevertheless, I wish him success!
